THE POLITICAL SCENE ent1y agrees. I asked Thomason what Clinton had said about Starr's team during their rainy walk with Buddy. "1 would never reveal anything the President told me, and I hope I'm smart enough not to ask him questions that would get me subpoenaed," Thomason said. "But I feel like the President thinks, These are not nice people." As far as the Thomasons are con- cerned, such attacks can be defeated only with an equally ferocious response. "Once everybody on our side falls in, this is war," Thomason said. "Never give them a break. Never give them one inch. Once you finally get that through your head, then you have to get out and fight this every way you can." As public reaction began to turn in r\.. Clinton's favor during the week after the story broke, Thomason contin- ued to coach the President, exhort- ing him to keep after his adversaries. When, for example, Thomason was walking Clinton to the door of the White House as he was leaving for Capitol Hill to give the State of the Union address, he told him, "Just remem- ber-you've got the biggest balls over there. Just go over and kick their butts." About a week later, after an official dinner in honor of Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the guests, includ- ing Thomason and Rahm Emanuel, the President's senior adviser for policy and strategy, were watching performances by Elton John and Stevie Wonder. Word began cir- culating that the Times would be running a damaging story in the following day's paper. Someone brought Thomason and Emanuel a copy of the story from the Inter- net, and the two men tried to read it in the dark; Thomason had to borrow Steven Spielberg's glasses. The Times report said that on the day after the President's deposition jk <we., .,c in the Pallia Jones case Clinton had :-:'.-:<<' ::= asked his secretary, Betty Currie, .:rro>-;<:: "a series of leading questions" about:;{ his relationship with Lewins and that Currie had retrieved some gifts the President had given the former intern. The story suggested that Clinton wanted his secretary to provide a benign interpretation of his relationship with Lewinsky. "By midnight, we were on the phone with Mickey and Harold, and by two- thirty or so we felt, This is O. K., we can handle this," he said. ' d all con- cerned had their orders for the morn- ing." It is worth noting how those orders played out. The Administration and its allies virtually ignored the sub- stance of the Currie story and instead blasted Starr for leaking it to the press, even though they offered no conclusive evidence that the Independent Coun- sel's office had leaked the story: In other words, the reaction was consistent with Thomason's philosophy of constant at- tack. "My grandfather used to say that the Bible said when someone hits you, you turn the other cheek," Thomason told me, "but after that you deck him." Since the session in the Roosevelt Room, Clinton has refused to answer any questions about Lewinsky, not- withstanding an earlier promise of " "..c . h h " 1 " more Inlormatlon, rat er t an ess, and "sooner rather than later." If it's up to Thomason, Clinton will not say another word in public about Lewin- sky. As Thomason sees it, Clinton's ad- versaries will never be satisfied, and his friends have heard as much as they want to hear on the subject. ' the re- search shows that people think it hap- pened between him and Monica, and they don't want to know the details," he told me "Even if she"-Lewinsky- . Æ : ..: . 1r... . :t . . (1= 1ia::t 1:; :;:':"" I,,, wt Ai%...:. "."oX ;:. .-.-". ".-. i# :;. i1Æii \.. DEATH T A\< ES A 'VVOR\<\NG- H 0 L I DA Y. 31 "says the worst, I think he should stick to the simple truth: it didn't happen. No amount of elaboration would con- vince people on either side." T HOUGH the Thomasons have drawn little public attention recently, they did have high profiles early in the Clinton Administration. Paula and Steve Jones certainly knew about them in those days, and at one point they apparently believed that the Thomasons had as much to offer them as the President did. In early 1994, when Jones was pondering whether to make public her sexual-harassment al- legations against Clinton, her first law- yer, Danny Traylor, contacted a Clinton ally in Arkansas named George Cook. In return for the J oneses' silence, Cook says, Traylor had two demands: a fairly modest sum of money, and a con- nection to Hollywood. "They wanted a job in show business, in movies, and she would never have a press confer- ence," Cook told me. "He implied that they thought the Thomasons' would be a good place to work." Traylor, for his part, told me he did not specifically ask that the Thomasons hire the Joneses, but he acknowledged that their names came up in his conversation with Cook. In any event, no such request was ever passed on to the Thomasons, and, of course, Jones went ahead with her c-- . ) . ., r .;.:- :;xx -:=-m- g . _ 't':;,c ;"' C'}"\Ø k uu ___... .... .. ." ':'Ù,,: -..:.:.:. . :O). :.: -: : . , 'Y:-"; ;. . --.'i;;.;.: . << :. .: . . __ u_ "n._ /: ':;::: :::: . :-:'::::::0 ' " .,: :: -. :. - -. -'.':'. . . ' <<" . .. . . . un n _ __ . - __ u_ .. ......... . . .h......... . - ........ _n. n. n. .... '.': ' ':'. ':' '. : .:.;..:., - .::;::.:.;...y-. .:,... .; - ..- . '-'. " . .......... .- t :